Jan 14 2026

Why a Cyberattack Didn’t Kill iRobot—But Exposed Why It Failed

Category: Cyber Attack,Cyber resilience — disc7 @ 8:44 am

iRobot—the company behind Roomba? In December 2025, it filed for bankruptcy. While some initially blamed a cyberattack, the real story is far more nuanced and instructive.

The incident often cited traces back to February 2022, when Expeditors, a major global freight and logistics provider, suffered a ransomware attack. The company shut down critical systems for nearly three weeks. Because iRobot relied on Expeditors for outsourced logistics, its supply chain effectively came to a halt. Products were stuck in warehouses, retailer deliveries were delayed, and iRobot incurred roughly $900,000 in retailer chargebacks. The company later sued Expeditors for approximately $2.1 million, a case that dragged on into 2024.

However, when viewed in context, the cyber incident was financially insignificant compared to iRobot’s broader troubles. In 2022 alone, iRobot’s revenue dropped by $382 million. Between 2022 and 2024, total losses reached nearly $600 million. During this period, the company also took on around $200 million in debt while waiting for its proposed acquisition by Amazon—an acquisition that was ultimately blocked by regulators. On top of that, tariffs hit its Vietnam manufacturing operations.

The alleged cyber-related losses represented less than 1% of iRobot’s total financial damage. Notably, the bankruptcy filing itself does not even mention the cyberattack or the lawsuit against Expeditors.

What ultimately drove iRobot into bankruptcy was competitive and strategic failure. Chinese competitors such as Roborock entered the market with better-performing products at lower prices, rapidly eroding iRobot’s market share. With the Amazon deal collapsing and margins under pressure, the company simply could not recover.

The broader lesson is important. Third-party cyber incidents are real and can cause measurable harm—lost revenue, operational disruption, and legal costs. But cyber risk rarely destroys a healthy business on its own. Instead, it accelerates failure in organizations that are already structurally weak.

Cyber risk acts like a stress test. A resilient company can absorb a vendor outage and recover. A struggling company, facing the same disruption, may find that it exposes cracks that were already there.

That is why cyber resilience matters more than pure cyber prevention. It is about ensuring your organization can take a hit and continue operating. During vendor reviews, leaders should be asking hard questions: Do contracts include meaningful SLAs, liability caps, and indemnity clauses? Does cyber insurance cover business interruption caused by vendor outages? How concentrated is vendor risk—could one failure freeze operations? And have backup providers actually been tested under realistic conditions?

The most important question remains: if a critical vendor went offline for three weeks, could your organization absorb the impact—or would it push you past the breaking point?

My Opinion

Blaming iRobot’s collapse on a cyberattack is intellectually lazy. The Expeditors incident mattered, but it did not cause the bankruptcy. iRobot failed because of competitive pressure, strategic missteps, and overreliance on a deal that never closed. The cyber incident merely revealed how little margin for error the company had left.

For executives, the takeaway is clear: cyber risk is rarely the root cause of failure—it is the accelerant. Strong businesses treat cyber resilience as part of overall business resilience. Weak ones learn about it only after it’s too late.

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Tags: Cyber Resilience, iRobot